TVGN hardware : The best Sims 4 mods

The best Sims 4 mods

Welcome to our list of the best Sims mods. New mods appear all the time on ModTheSims—which has long been the go-to hub for creators—every week. There, you’ll find everything from minor tweaks (like making medicine cabinets actually dispense medicines) to complete reworks of major systems.

It can be hard to keep track of which ones are working because some of the best mods haven’t been tended to in years, and official game updates can break them or add features that make them obsolete.

With that in mind, here’s a collection of the best up-to-date mods for the Sims 4, from the tiny to the virtual life-changing. Make sure you read the installation instructions for each one, and check for any conflicts to make sure you’re not running two that will clash.

Get a job

Players are adding new careers to ModTheSims every week, so if you’re ever looking for inspiration on which direction to steer your Sim in, give it a browse. The imagination behind them is impressive, and most of them give you a fully-fleshed out path to follow. Whether you want to become a bowling champ, game developer, professional hacker or private investigator, you can now follow your dreams. We especially like transforming our sim from a basketball draft pick to league MVP in the SBA Baller career.

A word of warning: these custom careers won’t work with most career overhaul mods, such as Turbo Careers—but don’t let that put you off.

Emotional Inertia

Sims are an emotional bunch, and their moods flip like a light switch. Just doing the simplest of activities—having an good meal in a well-decorated room—will fill them with joy for a few hours, but then the feeling will vanish. If that’s not to your taste, or if you think the system is just too easy to control, then you might want to download Emotional Inertia.

It makes emotions more meaningful: they’ll last longer, it’ll be harder to override them, and it will take more effort to reach the upper ranks of each one. You’ll no longer have an iron grip over whether your Sims are up or down, which makes them feel a bit more like real people.

Custom food interactions

If you want more culinary creativity, then Custom Food Interactions is the only place you should start. It doesn’t add any ingredients or recipes to the game—it just adds new possible interactions to cooking equipment along with a menu framework that lets you craft a fridge-full of custom meals from other modders’ kitchens.

With it installed, you’ll want to head over to the ModTheSims custom food section and pick from the menu. You’ll find recipes for everything from Chinese dumplings to beignets, blueberry cheesecake to biriyani. Grab an optional bib to make sure you don’t accidentally salivate on your keyboard.

Have Some Personality Please!

A huge overhaul of—as you can probably guess—the way Sims’ personalities work. It changes lots in the background (read the description on the mod page for an exhaustive list) but the best thing about it is that it eliminates all idle conversations. Never again will two Sims blab aimlessly to each other about nothing in particular: instead, they’ll be forced to choose an interaction, which is far more interesting.

Those interactions aren’t random, either: the mod will select them based on traits, moods and the existing relationships between the two Sims in question, which will give them a greater sense of autonomy than ever before. Expect more kisses from love interests—and more sucker punches from your enemies.

Become a Sorceror

Do you miss the magic of previous Sims games? Become a Sorcerer adds a hearty serving of the supernatural, letting your Sims sling magic spells that can either suck the sadness out of a friend or strike down an enemy with a bolt of lightning.

You just need to touch lump of clay, choose one of three rituals—they’ll determine which Needs are replaced with new magical ones—and get to casting. Using magic strengthens your powers and unlocks new spells, but it also depletes your “Magical Connection” (a mana bar, basically), and you’ll have to drain either yourself or another Sim to replenish it.

Depending on your choices, you’ll lean towards good or evil, which changes the type of spells you can cast. Do-gooders can eventually bring ghosts back to life, but if that doesn’t sound like fun, just set fire to a table instead. If you’re bored of your current playthrough, then this is bound to liven it up.

New personality traits

The Sims 4 has a long list of traits that change the way a Sim behaves, and because they’re relatively easy for modders to create you can quickly expand that list through custom content. The Gamer trait, for example, lets Sims improve their gaming and programming skills faster, while the Functional Robots group of traits lets you spawn human-machine hybrid Sims, or just full-on robots who must visit a recharging station every few hours.

There are tonnes of individual traits available on ModTheSims, or you can grab pre-made packages of traits, like this one from modder KawaiiStacie. It will make your Sims natural salespeople, born artists, or slick dancers. Get ready to bust a move.

Want to try out several new traits at once? This mod lets you add more than three traits at a time: you just need to type a quick cheat code including the name of the desired trait to add it to your Sim. It’s all explained on the mod page.

Build your own houseboat

If you’re tired on living on land then this mod lets you take to the water, transforming the game’s decorative boat models into full-on houseboats. They look pretty, and the limited space means you’ll have to get creative with what furniture you try to pack into them. It’s a good choice for a minimalist designer. Click here for a download link alongside instructions on building your first boat.

If you’re feeling particularly outdoorsy, then this separate mod will let you add a custom fishing location off of the side of your new home.

True Happiness

The idea behind this mod from roBurky is to make your Sims’ happiness “fleeting, meaningful, and personal”. In the normal game, ‘happy’ is the default state, but with this mod your Sims will have to make do with simply being ‘fine’ most of the time. They’ll only be truly happy when something special happens to them such as meeting a new partner, ripping through a good workout or eating a tasty meal. These events, of which there are many, will boost their mood considerably for a short period of time, which feels a bit more realistic.

Don’t worry, the ‘fine’ change doesn’t mean they’ll be grumpy by default—it still counts as a positive mood state.

Old French Village

Bring the Alsace to the Sims 4 with this charming village of old-fashioned cottages. There are ten houses to choose from of varying grandeur (the mansion at the top of the hill is particularly spacious) as well as a pub and café for when your Sims feel peckish.

Somehow, modder catdenny has made the village only using default assets from the game, which is impressive. It does mean that there are slight variations in style, but unless you’re a stickler for European architecture then it probably won’t bug you. It just looks like a nice place to live.

You can add the village in ‘Manage Worlds’, but it will only fit in a vacant 64×64 lot. Sadly, there are no lots big enough in the base game, so you’ll have to travel to Brindleton Bay (part of the Cats & Dogs expansion) or Windenburg (from Get Together) to find a viable plot.

Get to college

We’ve mentioned simmythesim’s Get to College mod before because it fills a gap that those who played The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 will keenly feel. The mod hasn’t been updated in many years, but luckily another modder has come along and patched it up. Grab it here.

Maybe one day we’ll get an official university expansion for The Sims 4, but for now this mod will let you pick one of three majors, carry out related activities and attend lectures, and study to get a good grade.

If the mod doesn’t work for you, then this University Career mod is a decent alternative, although it won’t actually let you visit the classroom. Those interested in the academic lives of their younger Sims may also want to check out Zerbu’s Go to School mod—just make sure you add a new Elementary School or High School to the neighbourhood for it to work.

Less ‘Musical Chairs’

This sounds boring, but Sims’ seating habits are so weird that Chris mentioned them in our Sims 4 review. Particularly annoying is the way they move around mid-conversation; when there are several Sims involved normal conversation can look like an elaborate game of Musical Chairs. Shimrod101 has built a mod that fixes that, making it far more likely that Sims will just stay put.

The mod’s download links are outdated, but thanks to another helpful player you can grab an updated version from here (scroll down to LittleMsSam’s comments). By default, it’ll also disable the occasionally infuriating group conversations Sims have around the table, which can override any one-on-one chats you’re trying to have. If you prefer, you can grab a version that keeps group conversations intact.

Turbo Careers

Another one from Zerbu, the Turbo Careers mod makes all adult (and two teen) careers function like the active careers from the Get to Work expansion. You can download work venues from the Gallery, including ones with a combined function, or make your own—just make sure they have the right objects for Sims to do their job.

The necessary activities for career progression are naturally related to the career—programming, cooking, exercising—and sometimes Sims will receive fieldwork. An athlete might have to go to the gym and show off her muscles, while a Sim who works in business might have to offer career advice to those running retail venues.

You can browseall available careers here and the venue requirements for every job here.

MC Command Center

MCCC is a mega-mod that lets you tweak virtually aspect of your Sims’ lives, giving you godlike control over them and others in their world. You can blacklist certain clothing items, even on Sims you aren’t controlling. You can set employment rates for Sims of different ages, scan Sims to find out if they’re pregnant, or even terminate the pregnancy.

There are also lots of automatic settings geared towards letting non-controlled Sims live full lives without you, getting married and having babies of their own volition, and you can also use the mod to adjust the in-game time settings so your Sims don’t take half a day to shower and have breakfast.

Heights

With the new Create-a-Sim tool in The Sims 4, you can spawn Sims of many different widths, but you can’t alter how tall they are. This height slider from GODJUL1 lets you adjust the height of your Sims so that the world looks more naturally varied: just click and drag their feet in Create-a-Sim to stretch or shrink them.

Replacement paintings

Once your artist Sim has churned out five paintings a day for a week you start to see the same images coming up again and again. This mod, from DaisyTighfield, replaces those default paintings across all categories with images from around the web, featuring lots of fanart from popular movies and video games.

If you like what you see, you can follow the links provided to find the original images on Deviantart or other sites. You can even create your own masterpieces for your Sims to paint in-game—the instructions are on the mod page.

Gender Preference mod

The Gender Preference mod lets you change the preferences Sims have for romantic partners of particular genders (in The Sims 4 currently that’s just two, female and male). You can adjust the numbers to set your Sims to prefer one gender to the exclusion of the other, to prefer one but also like the other, or to like both equally. Romance away.

Risky WooHoo

Another mod bringing The Sims closer to real life is one from PolarBearSims. It introduces a chance that female Sims who WooHoo rather than explicitly Try for Baby will still fall pregnant. The mod comes with a variety of different percentage risks and adjusts the chances based on where your Sims are getting it on as well as the traits they possess. It also reworks aspects of pregnancy, introducing complications and possible infertility for some Sims.

It should be noted that you can also manually adjust the chances of getting pregnant in MCCC. Risky WooHoo is compatible with that mod, but MCCC will overwrite the percentage chances.

If you’re looking to change the game even more, have a proper dig into the Create a Sim ‘custom gender settings’ in the base game. They were updated a while back and now provide you with more options, such as the ability to allow same-sex couples to fall pregnant.

And for even more control, check out artulwww’s Pregnancy Mega Mod, which lets you do things like give birth to quintuplets.

To get even more out of the game check out our round-up of the best Sims 4 expansions and game packs. If you want immortal Sims, free houses, and infinite money, check out our list of Sims 4 cheats.